Statistical Graphics and more

Now that the German Constitutional Court has judged that the so called “Vorratsdatenspeicherung” – the data retention for six months of all phone calls and e-mails to prepare against potential terrorist threats – to be inconsistent with the German constitution, discussions will heat up again regarding the best or at least necessary means to protect […]

This is from Daniel Keim’s “Call for Papers” for the EuroVAST 2010: “Visual Analytics is the science of analytical reasoning supported by interactive visual interfaces, which requires interdisciplinary science integrating techniques from visualization and computer graphics, statistics and mathematics, data management and knowledge representation, data analysis and machine learning, cognitive and perceptual sciences, and more.” Hmm, these […]

For those who are used to work with graphics on a regular basis, it is usually not a question, what plot (or combination of plots) to use when looking at particular data problems. Nevertheless, many statistically trained researcher and practitioners have a hard time to translate data problems into reasonable graphics (not to mention their […]

On Wednesday, January 27th, (not only) the IT-world will be looking westwards to what is coming from Cupertino. Apple will reveal their “latest creation”. Nothing new regarding the staging: rumors are piling in blogs and news lists for months, analysts predict the dark or golden future of Apple and their competitors (depending on who pays […]

Here is the post-post scriptum of one of Andrew Gelman’s blog entries. The post was discussing how it could possibly be that such an influential statistician like Brian Ripley has such an outdated webpage: P.P.S. Somebody pointed out that you can search for B D Ripley’s recent papers using Google. Here’s what’s been going on […]

I found this on the infoaesthetics blog. There is one slide in the presentation that made me think: I got the impression that this quote from Herbert George Wells – more known for his science fiction literature – suffers badly when modified this way. Statistical thinking – from my point of view – means the ability […]

When it comes to graphing data in a chart, the scale of the data is the most important factor to determine which graphical representation might be useful. Please pardon me for the examples using the “Iris Data” and the “Titanic Data”; but these data sets are prototypes for multivariate continuous data and multivariate categorical data […]

The last post on the Palm Pre internationalization was a kind of a funny embaressment we all could have a good laugh on. Well, Palm did start to fix it and the current version looks like this: It is hard to translate a typo into a foreign language (especially as a non-native) but the “2.5 […]

There is no doubt, the PalmPre is the only competitor for the iPhone that can be taken seriously, i.e., which has a user interface which is really optimized for small screen devices. Palm was doing a great job – not only in hiring developers from Jobs – but also in getting the phone to a […]

Being relatively close to the Kröller-Müller Museum during vacation, it was a good chance to finally see the original painting which is used for the Mondrian logo. The image used for the logo is actually the “Compositie in kleur B” from 1917 (left painting). The fact that the logo is a 90 degree rotation of […]

Robert has released the wonderful parallel sets tool in version 2. It is JAVA, it is interactive – so what do we want more! As I spent some time thinking about the display of categorical data and creating tools for their visualization myself, I thought it would be a great idea to compare the parallel […]

The definition of when someone shall be counted as being poor is usually done by some kind of statistics. The definition in Germany is when you earn less than the half of the median income. When you want to look figures to be more dramatic you also add the range where people are counted to […]